Abstract:

The relatively low adaptability of the Romanian education to the requirements of the participants in the training process is reflected in the non-compliance with the requirements of the economy, especially in the industry. This leads to an inability to reduce the gaps between Romania and the developed countries.

ICT rapidly penetrated in education, a field that is going through a transition period, which supposes innovative provided information. More and more advanced software and hardware resources are being used to deliver courses and teaching materials with a rich educational content.

E-learning is part of the new educational paradigm and is characterized by a learner-oriented curriculum, distributed resources, virtual facilities, a variety of flexible roles. Education interfaces encourage the learner to be self-taught and engaged directly in the learning process. Nowadays, the demand for courses made in the technology of long-distance education is considerable.

In the field of management and marketing, online learning programs are present in postgraduate and in-service training courses, that aim to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

The paper includes a presentation of a complex electronic course in the field of management and marketing of small and medium enterprises. The e-course includes all the knowledge gained over the years in the projects related to e-learning, but also fundamental researches in the Multi-Attribute Decision Making. It has two parts: Management and Marketing. Each part includes 8 modules with 5 lessons; for each module, there are knowledge verification tests; case studies and problems solved; the most frequently asked questions section and an additional bibliography. Ending the course with an exam and a note implies a high degree of seriousness.

Particular importance has been given to the development of problems and case studies on concrete issues raised in the day-to-day activity of SMEs. The paper presents an example of a management decision problem, concerning the strategy that must be followed in a critical point: problem refers the case of an enterprise which produces and sells cosmetic products. As a result of a careless management, the enterprise faces a financial crisis and fails to afford the purchasing of necessary raw materials for carrying on the production process.

Finally, the enterprise is forced to give up one of the current line products. For exploring a minimum number of alternatives, some limitations upon the products attributes were imposed according to the growth strategy of the enterprise. In order to select the optimal alternative, 5 attributes have been considered as relevant for the products. After pursuing a detailed analysis, a 4 products list meeting these conditions was established. These alternatives point out the object set, from which the optimal one will be chosen. Because the attributes influence in different ways the decision-making process, each of them received a relative importance weight, provided by 6 experts: 2 of them provide a hierarchy of the importance degrees corresponding to the attributes; 2 experts provide information under the utility vectors and the rest give a preference matrix. For solving the problem, from the large variety of mathematical modeling techniques, the TODIM method is considered, on the idea that the optimal variant is the closest one to the ideal solution.

Keywords:

e-learning, e-business, MADM (Multi-Attribute Decision Making), management, marketing.